While many people celebrated Labor Day weekend enjoying the waning days of summer, some attendees at the Telluride Film Festival were among the first to see a surprise new documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, the convicted fraudster and founder of the blood-testing startup Theranos.
Holmes famously claimed to have revolutionized blood testing, raising billions of dollars for Theranos, only for the whole thing to unravel after a series of investigations by regulators and journalists—most notably, due to the reporting of John Carreyrou of the Wall Street Journal. Carreyrou recounted the ordeal in his acclaimed 2018 book, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup.
Holmes was eventually found guilty on several counts related to fraud and conspiracy. In 2022, she was sentenced to more than 11 years in prison, a sentence that was reduced to nine years and six months earlier this year.
Why the documentary is capturing attention
The documentary project, released by A24, is called You Can See Everything, and was reportedly filmed in secret over a three-year period by filmmakers Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim.
It has a run time of nearly three hours, and offers a look at Holmes’s life in the weeks before she went to prison, along with some reenactments.
The film will head to theaters in October, according to the trailer, which features a short, strange, and tense, intimate conversation between Fielder and Holmes. At one point, Holmes asks him why she’d want to deceive him, as “there’s no reason for me to do that.” This, as her infant son babbles and coos just offscreen.
Real-life and dramatized versions of Holmes have been portrayed on the big and small screens a few times before.
Alex Gibney’s The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley was released in 2019, followed in 2021 by Valley of Hype: The Culture That Built Elizabeth Holmes from Yahoo Finance.
In 2022, Hulu released a drama series, The Dropout, starring Amanda Seyfried as Holmes, who was known for her turtlenecks and deep speaking voice.
However, Holmes herself was not involved in any of those projects.
That’s why the new documentary—which features rare interviews with Holmes—is capturing so much attention. The access is paired with what is broadly being described as some creative filmmaking on the part of Fielder and Oppenheim.
Fielder is known for his surreal comedy projects, such as the docu-reality series Nathan for You.
The reaction so far
Prior to shooting the documentary, Holmes hadn’t given an interview in roughly a decade, according to Pete Hammond, writing for Deadline. Hammond writes that the film is “unlike any I have ever seen in terms of pure access,” and that it contains “some astonishing twists and turns and jaw-dropping surprises.”
Other people at the screening had similar reactions.
Film critic Scott Mantz took to X to say that it was “FRIGGIN’ BRILLIANT — a gripping, riveting, offbeat, existentional, fascinating, unexpectedly hilarious & revealing (I think?) film that you cannot take your eyes off of!”
Erik Nordgren, an audio engineer and sound designer for film and TV, likewise wrote that the film “turns from an uneasy as hell doc into something structurally, stylistically, and formally even more shocking. Like nothing I’ve ever seen.”
The trailer for You Can See Everything has so far attracted more than 2.7 million views, just one day after being posted to YouTube.